"Simply put, Speck Trek is the prediction of white specks and other
textile processing flawsfrom field to fabric," says plant
physiologist Judith M. Bradow, who organized the informal collaborative group.

"It lets researchers from diverse fields exchange knowledge on how the
environment affects cotton quality," she says. "Much like the
television and movie Star Trek crews, we use our diverse backgrounds to solve
problems. It's just that our focus is on what growers, ginners, and mills can
do when nature doesn't cooperate."

Having more than one kind of researcher address textile dyeing problems
makes sense, because poorly dyeing fabric can come from a number of sources.
Poor growing conditions, plant disease, and errors in processing may all
contribute. And once a fabric has those tell-tale white spots of undyed fiber,
it must be discounted or thrown out.

"Textile people must worry about dye imperfections," says Bradow.
"At a 1991 conference they listed them as the second most important
problem in textiles. But at the time, nobody was looking into the physiological
reasons for a fabric not taking up dyes."

Bradow and her colleague, plant physiologist Gayle H. Davidonis, decided to
explore the connection between dyeing quality and plant health. The two
scientists are stationed at the ARS Southern Regional Research Center in New
Orleans, Louisiana. The center is home to several textile and fiber
laboratories, including the Cotton Fiber Quality Research Unit.

Cotton brought $482 million to Louisiana's economy in 1995. That made it the
state's top-earning crop by USDA estimates. The entire U.S. domestic cotton
cropfiber and seedwas valued at over $55 billion.

But cotton plants are not in it for the moneythey only want to
reproduce. Their fruit, known as the boll, contains the fiber and seed.
Researchers speculate the plants first produced fiber to scatter seed, either
by wind or by hitching rides on passing animals.

But self-preservation takes over when it comes to bad growing conditions.
The plant may allow only a few bollsor even seedsto ripen and
mature fully. Just a single dry day can cause problems, for without water, the
plant doesn't produce the carbohydrates needed to fill the fiber walls with
cellulose required for dyeing. Electron microscopy done by other researchers at
New Orleans demonstrated this problem.

When Bradow decided to explore what growers could do to counter nature's ill
effects, she needed more than the greenhouses at the center. So she joined
forces with agronomist Philip J. Bauer in the ARS Cotton Production Research
Unit at Florence, South Carolina, who had plenty of test fields.

When storms from Hurricane Andrew drenched Bauer's cotton crop in 1992, he
sent Bradow boll samples. Together, they analyzed how cloudy days and excess
rain had damaged fiber quality. They continue to research the effects of
irrigation and temperature on cotton and are to be joined by a university soil
scientist who can expand their work.

Soon other researchers were also sending boll and fiber samples to either
Bradow or to her partner, depending on their experiments' requirements. While
both analyze fiber, Davidonis specializes in fiber development and seed
quality, and Bradow's expertise is in boll maturity.

Having these scientific contacts puts Bradow and Davidonis in a position to
link people with resources. Speck Trek reaches a worldwide audience and Bradow
says she expects more farmers and crop consultants will be participating in
research projects, helping scientists develop real-world cotton-growing
databases that can become part of computer models.

"We have software to help growers enhance yield, and we have software
to help textile mills make fabric," Davidonis explains. "What we
don't have yet is the bridge between them. Our databases will be the building
blocks for that bridge."

Another original member of the team, biochemist Gretchen F. Sassenrath-Cole,
became a trekker soon after she joined the ARS Crop Simulation Research Unit at
Mississippi State University. Her first interest was to find out how much
energy cotton plants needed to produce flowers and grow bolls. But she
couldnt check fiber quality until the bolls completely formed, which
stymied her research.

Through Bradow, Sassenrath-Cole gained access to an AFIS (Advanced Fiber
Information System) that can track developmental stages of fiber.

"It was really exciting the first time we ran some of the immature
fiber samples through," she says. "The bolls were only 24 days past
floral anthesis, which is less than halfway through the normal boll growth
period. In the few minutes it took to run the sample through AFIS, we had all
the information on fiber length, degree of cell wall development, shape, and
maturity."

Now Sassenrath-Cole is researching the ways that environment affects fiber
quality. To explore this, she will rely on fiber analysis from Bradow.

"Previously, other researchers found fiber walls that looked like
annual rings you see on trees trunks. The cotton fibers cell wall would
be thick in some places and thin in others, and the rings would be more
pronounced with cooler night temperatures, says Sassenrath-Cole. We
want to see if we can identify similar changes under field growth
conditions.

Sassenrath-Cole will also be looking at the role leaves play in maintaining
an optimal growth temperature. Some cotton varieties have smaller leaves, which
may result in greater temperature variations within the crop canopy.

Speck Trek also connected Sassenrath-Cole and Bradow with biochemist Allen
K. Murray of Glycozyme, Inc., in Irvine, California. Their research helped him
explore cotton fiber and leaf biochemistry.

"What Gretchen provided me was fully documented developmental stages of
cotton," says Murray. "I had already done work linking water, plant
metabolism, and fiber development. But without actual boll samples at 21, 28,
42, and 56 days, I couldn't demonstrate that the big changes were happening
with sugars in the plant."

He says that the samples came with an extensive fiber analysis from Bradow,
making for consistency and thoroughness.

"It's this unique treatment of the same sample in three laboratories
that is so unusualand outstanding," says Murray. Through this
cooperation, he also got results suggesting there are two genetic markers for
sugar that occur mainly in drought stress.

"They actually appear before the plant shows any outward signs of
drought stress and offer the possibility of an early-warning system for
growers," says Murray. "I had documented differences between
irrigated and drought-stressed cotton in California, but I had no way to
correlate the differences until I received Gretchens developmental
samples of normal and temperature-stressed bolls.

We also benefit from Murrays impressive research facility and
extensive biochemistry knowledge, says Bradow. Its all part
of the Speck Trek mission. We build opportunities through cooperation.
 By Jill Lee, ARS.